PLAZA PLANS?
Why would the City of Rochester
want to buy MidtownPlaza?
For several reasons, maybe. But chief among them is fear. Fear
that the wrong developer might buy it.
City Council was to vote last night on approving an option
to buy the massive complex. According to the terms of the deal, $250,000 gets
the city the option to buy the complex for $6 million. The city would have that
option through February.
The suggestion that the city own a property that was once
the glory of downtown has created a buzz — good and bad. Some people are
already comparing the idea to the purchase of the ferry. But the city’s plan
isn’t to be a long-term owner. Instead, officials say they want to shepherd the
property to an owner whose plans will be compatible with the city’s. Between
now and February, officials will be able to scrutinize Midtown, determine
whether it makes sense to go through with the purchase, and look for a buyer.
Midtown has always been a concern, City Attorney Tom
Richards told City Newspaper earlier this week. But when the current owners
informed city officials recently that they would be selling the property, that
“pushed it to the forefront of our agenda in a way we wouldn’t have chosen
otherwise,” Richards said.
The city hasn’t lined up a developer to buy the property,
but “we’re working on it,” said Richards. “We’ve been working on it for some
time.” And there has been interest among developers, he said.
Ideally, city officials want to find a developer before the
option expires in February, he said, “so the city can effectively plan for the
risk” of taking on the property.
The possibility of the wrong developers getting their hands
on Midtown scares anyone working on improving the city’s downtown.
“This is a huge property in terms of its size and scale,”
says Heidi Zimmer-Meyer, president of the Rochester Downtown Development
Corporation. “Whatever happens to that property will affect everything around
it.”
One of the bigger fears is that a real-estate investment
company with a “buy and hold” strategy could buy Midtown. Such investors buy a
property, wait for nearby growth and investment to drive up its value up, and
then sell.
“The risk of that happening is very real,” says
Zimmer-Meyer, since there is “a whole slew of players” with that strategy.
Midtown encompasses enough of downtown that such a strategy
seems like a catch-22: it’s tough to envision much serious growth happening in
its vicinity without Midtown being a part of it.
That might be apparent to locals, says Zimmer-Meyer, but not
necessarily to an out-of-town investor.
“If you’ve got 100 properties in your portfolio, you may not
stop to think that through,” she says.
In addition to blocking potentially bad owners, city
ownership could have some important benefits. First, it would be easier for the
city to get money for lead paint and asbestos remediation — federal or state
funds, for example — than for a private developer. And lead paint and
asbestos are big concerns at Midtown.
City ownership also “allows more flexibility on resale,”
says Zimmer-Meyer. Perhaps the biggest way is that the city can declare Midtown
an urban renewal zone, which under state law means it could sell the property
— whole or in part — at below-market rates.
Those kinds of benefits could be exactly the boost Midtown
needs to become attractive to local developers again.
— Krestia DeGeorge
JAZZ FEST, BABY
It’s
a ways off, and we have yet to wade through all the holidays, but the bigwigs
that run the Rochester International Jazz Fest have announced next spring’s
dates: June 8-16.
Club
Passes go on sale November 17 at 10 a.m. for $99 and can be
purchased at www.ticketmaster.com or at any Ticketmaster/Ticket Express Outlet. After April 5 the price
goes up to $119. (Last year Club Passes sold out.)
And
RIJF promoter John Nugent has put his money where his mouth is (when his sax
isn’t in it). Currently living in Toronto, Nugent has bought a house
in Brighton and will move here this
spring.
Nugent
says working in Rochester rather than constantly
commuting around LakeOntario will help him improve the
ever-growing festival now in its sixth year. But how’ll he top last year’s
line-up?
“Just
watch, dude”, he said on Monday. “I’ve got some really, really cool stuff.”
—
Frank De Blase
MAKING THE TECH LEAP
Two years ago, the Rochester
school district had more than 380 computer software programs. All of them were old,
and none could communicate with other programs.
“Try managing information on 6,000 employees and 35,000
students using that approach,” says Ford Greene, the district’s chief of
information management and technology. After spending 25 years with IBM and
starting his own company — something he grew from five to 120 employees —
Greene thought he was ready to retire. But then Superintendent Manuel Rivera
asked him to assess the district’s management information systems.
It has cost millions, but the district has upgraded an
antiquated, disjointed, and paper-intensive system at every level — from
student instruction to financial management.
“There was a time when I was getting all of these different
financial reports, and none of the data matched up,” says Rivera. “It was so
frustrating when you consider the responsibility involved.”
Until this fall, Greene says, teachers in all of the
district’s 60 schools spent the first 15 minutes of class taking attendance
manually. Then they left their classrooms to hand-deliver the completed forms
to the principal’s office.
On the first day of school this year, all 3,500 teachers
took attendance on a computer system called Chancery. It gives a real-time
picture of attendance and immediately signals administrators about truancy
patterns.
“Instead of spending time in instruction, where you would
want teachers to be, these poor folks couldn’t tell if a student was out for
the day or on suspension,” says Greene.
Another program similar to one used at the University
of Rochester, People Soft, pulls
financial management and human resources under one system.
“We have 5,000 substitute teachers,” says Greene. The new
system contacts subs and examines issues like sick pay and patterns in employee
absences — for instance, a teacher who’s always out on Mondays.
Chancery alone cost about $600,000, but most of the
expense is being reimbursed, about 88 cents of every dollar,
by the federal government. There are ongoing costs, however, such as licensing
fees and 24-hour tech support. One annual Microsoft contract, which the board
is considering, will cost $70,000. Greene has been offering board members a
weekly technology breakfast — sort of a high-tech boot camp to help them
understand the new technology, its benefits, and the costs they are asked to
approve.
Freeing more time for classroom instruction has been his
main goal, he says. “After we all used Chancery, I got over a hundred e-mails
from teachers thanking me,” says Greene. “And you know, the interesting thing
was that they were mostly from the older, often less technology-proficient
teachers who have been in the classroom for 15 years. They were buried in
paperwork. This is empowering.”
But the person who impressed him most during this transition
was the mother of a student who went up to Greene and his wife in a restaurant.
Greene had found a program through Dell Computers that gives students last
year’s models free. The Rochester
district has given the computers to at-risk students who took a program
learning how to install software, and the woman’s son was one of those
students.
“The main difference between our students and kids in the
suburbs is that our kids usually only have access to computers in school,” says
Greene. “This mother, a waitress, came up to me and says, my husband left me
with an angry 13-year-old boy who was failing. The confidence he has gained by
learning about computers gave me a different son.”
— Tim Louis Macaluso
BATISTE ON POST-RUMSFELD
Outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has had many
critics, but few have been as harsh as retired Major General John
Batiste.
“It was a step in the right direction,” Batiste said early
this week, referring to Rumsfeld’s resignation. “But
we now need to seize the moment and dramatically change what’s happening on the
ground.”
Anti-war activists won’t find much comfort in Batiste’s
recommendations. He has publicly agonized over how the war was executed, but
not over the war itself. He insists that victory is still possible and
non-negotiable. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have been honest with the
public about the threat from radical Islamists, he says. And leaving Iraq
in shambles would make a bad situation worse.
“Americans really don’t understand what’s at stake here,” he
said in an interview on Monday. “Our leaders failed to mobilize this country.
We need the kind of leadership and personal sacrifice that Americans have not
seen since World War II.”
His prescription for the future:
• Federalize Iraq
into threeregions, since the current parliamentary-style government is
ineffective;
• Bring in an additional 100,000 troops from NATO and from
countries within the region that have a stake in seeing a stable Iraq, such as
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan;
• Secure the borders with Iran
and Syria;
• Reduce Iraq’s
massive unemployment, particularly among young, fighting-age men.
With US
troops stretched thin, Batiste said, it should be clear to Americans that the US
military is under-funded, under-resourced, and too small. And given the way the
war has been conducted, he said, he’s not even sure that R&D has kept pace.
— Tim Louis Macaluso
GRADES FOR PLAY
Don’t look for immediate changes to the Rochester
school district’s policy barring failing students from extracurricular
activities. A group of parents have been pushing for a revision, arguing that
students may be more inclined to drop out if they can’t take part in sports,
but they’ve met some resistance from Superintendent Manuel Rivera.
School Board member Tom Brennan has drafted a new policy
letting students who fail a class continue to play sports under certain
conditions. The policy would require the district to provide additional
academic help for the students.
But at a School Board committee meeting last week, a
concerned Superintendent Rivera said he wouldn’t sanction letting a student
with an F in a core subject — English or math, for instance — take part in
extracurricular activities. And he said that the district already provides much
of the help Brennan’s policy would require. Any student with an F has to attend
special classes in order to participate in extracurricular activities.
Providing additional individualized tutoring would have a significant impact on
the district’s budget, he said. And some of Brennan’s proposals would change
teachers’ responsibilities, which would need union approval, Rivera said.
Brennan still says he wants the policy to be less punitive.
He plans to revise his proposal and present it to the board in December.
— Tim Louis Macaluso
This article appears in Nov 15-21, 2006.
